Princess Bride

Jennifer Garner on fashion, her body, and the other Bennifer

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"Doesn't it make you happy to see that?" Jennifer Garner asks, pausing in front of one of Vincent van Gogh's greatest hits, Irises. It's a sunny Southern California morning, and the actress is visiting the Getty Center, the sparkling Richard Meier-designed art mecca in Brentwood, near the house she shares with her husband, the actor (and soon to be director) Ben Affleck, their 13-month-old daughter, Violet, and two mutually enraptured dogs, Martha Stewart and Hutch. Let other Hollywood A-listers mumble seductively into tape recorders amid the dark shadows of the Chateau Marmont; Garner prefers interviews to resemble an educational class trip. "It's kind of sugarcoated cereal, I guess," she says, considering impressionism. "You know everyone's going to like it. But it makes me happy."

Much like her favorite paintings, Garner is in the happiness business: light, colorful, healthy—mass without relinquishing class. As the constantly transmogrifying spy Sydney Bristow on ABC's recently canceled sci-fi cult hit Alias and superheroine Elektra Natchios in Daredevil (2003) and its best-forgotten sequel, she established herself as one of the foremost female action stars of her generation. Playing a teenager trapped in the body of a magazine editrix in 2004's romantic comedy 13 Going on 30, she inspired talk that the industry had found its next Julia Roberts, the most recent lippy, brown-eyed brunette to capture the heart of the heartland. And Roberts never developed much of a roundhouse kick. "There aren't a lot of guys who can do that," says actor Timothy Olyphant, Garner's costar in this month's mordant new dramedy Catch and Release, about a woman whose fiancé dies unexpectedly, in which audiences will get to glimpse more of her softer side. "Let's just hope it doesn't look like she can kick my ass."

Stripped of wigs and props, Garner resembles less a fearsome dominatrix than a loping, eager puppy. She's a gorgeous but gawky presence, still schoolgirlish at 34, with long, shiny dark hair ("I only got layers for the first time in the past five years," she says), an Ivory Girl complexion, a mouth that moves in a million directions, and limbs that she doesn't seem quite in control of despite years of ballet training.

"Oh, my butt crack is showing," Garner says, hitching up a pair of jeans whose designer she can't identify as she plunks down outside the museum with a paper cup of decaf Earl Grey tea and a jumbo hunk of greasy banana bread. She's also wearing red Gucci boots and a black Marc Jacobs turtleneck. Fashion has never been an obsession, though she does work with omnipresent stylist Rachel Zoe for red-carpet events. "I would be happy if there was a uniform for life and we didn't think about it," Garner says. "I do appreciate people who have style. I like to look at it. And I even like when I accidentally stumble onto something that is a combination of me and something fancy—that makes me happy. But otherwise, the whole thing terrifies me."

Accidental stumbles have become something of a Garner hallmark; as a presenter at the 2006 Oscars, she tripped on the hem of her cream-color Michael Kors gown onstage, only to recover, dimple, and nimbly ad-lib, "I do my own stunts." Unlike, say, Angelina Jolie, another pillow-lipped yummy mummy with a knack for action, Garner has a natural klutziness that makes her both endearing to men and unthreatening to women. Even if 13 Going on 30 wasn't your cup of tea, you had to appreciate how she reached in and pulled out her—and perhaps your—inner doofus, leading a dance floor full of office drones in a spirited rendition of the "Thriller" video.

"She's so fearless," says that movie's director, Gary Winick. "Clearly you want to watch her, and she lights up the screen and all that, but she's also willing to be a goofball and make herself look bad."

"She's a girl that a guy can very easily be friends with," says Jason Bateman, one of her costars in The Kingdom, an ensemble thriller directed by Peter Berg due out this summer. "Usually I would be sort of fumbling and disarmed by somebody so pretty, but she's even more distracting as a pal: funny and energetic and sarcastic." Acting, he adds, "is not a hard thing for her to do, and that's nice to be around. A lot of actors take this stuff real seriously and make it brain surgery, and it's so not."

"At the risk of sounding politically incorrect, she's just a cool chick," adds Olyphant, who has known her since they appeared together in the little-seen independent movie 1999 (1998). "In a very refreshing way, she's very much the same," he says. "She knows everybody's name and seems to be very much in touch with everyone around her, and you just don't see that as often as you'd like from your leading ladies. She has a certain groundedness."

Garner's roots are in Charleston, West Virginia, where she grew up the middle of three daughters. Her sisters are "the single biggest thing about me," she says. "They're the ones cushioning me on either side." Her father was a chemical engineer, her mother an English teacher, and the Garner girls were encouraged to study hard and appreciate the arts. "We hardly saw movies," Garner says. "It was a much bigger deal for us if Annie came through. We saw Flowers for Algernon when I was probably six, and Mom said that at the end, I stood up on my chair and was screaming and clapping." Her childhood idols, though, were not actresses, but Beverly Cleary and Laura Ingalls Wilder. "I really wanted to be a children's author. But what I was doing was performing."

Garner majored in drama at Denison University, and when she was 20, an older friend of the family, a former casting director, invited her over to discuss her craft. "He said, 'Now, this is going to happen a lot: People are going to want to see your body, so lift up your shirt and just let me take a look,'" she remembers, wincing. "Isn't that foul? And I just said 'No.' I was such a prude. There was no way I was going to lift up my shirt."

And yet as long as she's been in the public eye, she's seemed completely at ease revealing her body. On YouTube, there's a much-viewed video of a young Garner dropping trou to large tighty-whities at a wrap party for the Georgia Shakespeare summer festival. "Really?" Garner exclaims innocently. "Oh my God, it was a joke!" And all the lingerie scenes in Alias? "I was in about half the lingerie that they wanted me to be in! Every now and then I'd get a script that would be like, 'Sydney's in a bikini,' and I'd be like, 'I can't! You have to give me notice. I have to have months to get ready. Don't make me do it.' Am I uncomfortable? It's as easy as this: If I feel like I'm in shape, if I feel secure about my body that day, then I don't really care. Otherwise it is incredibly painful." She thinks a bit more. "I'm okay with it. Definitely. I mean—yeah, I will definitely streak somewhere before I would get drunk."

A size 6/8—"definitely more an 8," she says—Garner recently began working out, following a long pre- and postpartum hiatus. "I'm in the worst shape ever," moans the actress, who did huff a bit mounting the museum steps. "My trainer just shakes her head and says, 'This is a disaster.' I am as physically unfit as I've probably been in my whole life. It's such a horror in front of the mirror without any clothes on." She lifts her sweater and squeezes her tummy. "You still have that little bit of extra skin, know what I mean? But still, it's enough for people to think that you're knocked up. No, everyone calm down. Nobody's pregnant."

Fascination with the size of her midriff aside, Garner has largely been tabloid Teflon. Her wholesome image was not besmirched by the end of her short first marriage, to Felicity costar Scott Foley, nor a subsequent affair with Alias costar Michael Vartan, nor her rapid replacement of Jennifer Lopez as the object of Affleck's affections. How did it feel to step into the pop phenom's spike Manolos? "I'm not going to go there," Garner says demurely. "That's his life and his past. He has always been so respectful of her, and in turn I'm going to be respectful of him." And of the rumor that she turned down the part of Pamela Ewing in the big-screen remake of Dallas because Lopez was attached to play Sue Ellen? "What? That's crazy. No, no, no. No one offered me any role. That's totally silly."

Indeed, while the first Bennifer seemed, well, like a four-minute music video, Bennifer Part Deux is apparently more of a 1950s domestic comedy. Garner gardens, waxes rhapsodic about the recipes in The Foster's Market Cookbook ("chicken, spaghetti squash, roasted tomatoes"), enjoys cleaning closets—"my former roommate will tell you that I was the person to scrub the bathroom"—and says a good date night with Affleck is if she's at the stove and there's Scrabble involved. As for her days, "most of the time by far I'm at home with my daughter," she says. "My husband is superinvolved and very present, so I don't have that feeling of wandering around the house bumping into things. I have just enough stuff that gets me out where I feel like, Oh look, I exist in the world."

Thanks to her spouse, she is also more engaged with current events. "I didn't grow up in a politically active family like he did, and I'm jealous of him that way," she says. "I've always felt slightly behind. But it's like baseball: The more you know about it, the more you like it. I'm finally learning the difference between Sunni and Shiite, you know what I mean? And thank goodness, I find that [Ben and I] are pretty much on the same page."

The most precious flower in the Affleck-Garners' bower, of course, is Violet. "She's saying 'ee-i-ee-i-o'—and 'mama'!" Garner crows. "Ben is upset about that." She shows off a picture on her PDA of him holding Violet swathed in a monkey towel, her ears like teacup handles ("she has my ears," Garner says). What about the old saying that having a newborn is like detonating a bomb in a marriage? "I was ready for that, I kept preparing, but it hasn't been the case at all," Garner says. "Maybe it's because we were newlyweds. I think it's just he is also a very understanding individual. A compassionate, generous guy. He's great with her and she loves him, and it makes it a lot easier on me."

Having a live-out, on-call nanny also helps. "This feel­ing that there are other mothers who don't have what they need to take care of their kids—I suddenly feel so philanthrophic," Garner says. Not that she's ready to become some kind of country-club, charity-board matron. "I would just like to have as varied a career as I can, for as long as it wants me and I want it. But it's hard. It's not a generous career. You know, when things are good, you kind of have to take advantage, and no one really cares if you have a kid, and you wanna...but that's okay."

Walking across the Getty courtyard, Garner loses her balance again, but manages to spare the fanny-packed tourists the sight of a famous actress face-planting.

"It's not a straight line, this job," she says. "You go along and you go backward and then to the side and then you leap forward, and it's like, holy shit! I definitely think if I never got another job, I'd go to grad school! Just because I want to remind myself that my job's not what makes me happy in life."